Penicillin

Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming at St. Mary's Hospital in London. Fleming observed mold growing on a petri dish covered in bacteria, and where the mold grew bacteria didn’t. The mold, Penicillium notatum, produced an antibiotic substance that Fleming named penicillin.

When Fleming’s published findings generated little interest, he enlisted chemists to purify the penicillin compound from the mold. Fleming was unsuccessful and gave up. Nearly ten years later, in 1937, a team of scientists at Oxford discovered Fleming’s work and began the “Penicillin Project”. They also struggled to isolate penicillin from the mold, and after three years developed a successful but extremely inefficient process for producing  penicillin. In 1940, they had enough penicillin for animal trials. They infected 8 mice with a deadly dose of bacteria, and remarkably, the four mice given penicillin survived.

The production of penicillin remained limited, requiring gallons of mold broth to produce a fingernail of penicillin. It wouldn’t be until 1945 before penicillin was commercially available in the US. 

In The Hesperus Prophecy, Declan receives a life-saving course of penicillin in 1939, even before the compound was tested on mice. The Clypeate knew about Fleming’s 1928 research on penicillin, and the “Penicillin Project” at Oxford wasn’t the only team working on purifying the world’s first antibiotic.

Alexander Fleming